A place that lives alongside you.
What is self-care?
From what we have seen, most self-care apps fail to deliver a proper experience not because of technical issues or graphic design choices, but because of a misunderstanding of the term itself.
We believe a person's mental wellbeing should not be a side effect of gamification or of constant attention-seeking. We believe it should be the only thing the app measures - and since it cannot be measured, there should be no metrics at all.
That means no daily streaks, no lists to work through and no notifications shouting for attention, pulling the user back in and serving them the same loop of short fulfilments dressed up as self-care, over and over again.
We believe an app built to help people feel better about themselves should first and foremost be quiet. Not boring, and not disengaging - quiet in the sense of knowing where the lines are, when the user needs it and when they do not, and never crossing them.
That rule is not only about staying out of somebody's day. It holds inside the app too. Someone reaching for a tool for their wellbeing should not have to get past anything to reach it - no greeting, no detour, nothing to dismiss first. Everything else the app has to offer waits further down, where it can be found on purpose and never sits in the way.
And they should not be expected to be perfect. None of us is. So why would a self-care app even notice when the most natural thing in the world - imperfection - happens?
What does accessible mean?
Accessibility usually arrives as a checklist. A contrast ratio, a label for a screen reader, a font size that can be nudged up a step. Those things matter and we do them, but they are the floor of the word, not the meaning of it.
To us, being accessible means being able to use the app without limits. There are three of those worth naming.
It costs nothing. An app that asks for money before it helps somebody feel better has already decided who is allowed to feel better. Hollowine is free, all of it, and stays that way - not free for now, not free until it has to start paying for itself. Nothing is held back to fill a paid tier later, because there is no paid tier to design towards.
It does not have one fixed shape. People arrive with different eyes, different hands, different amounts of attention and different days. So the app bends to them: how it looks, how much it moves, how loud it is, how much of it is there at all. A setting is not a preference we tolerate. For somebody it is the only way in, which makes it part of the app rather than a concession from it.
It assumes nothing about who is opening it. Every decision gets asked the same question: what if the person opening this is having the worst evening of their year? Not what if they are an expert, not what if they are motivated. Empathy is not a tone we write in - it is the case we design for, and the ordinary evening then takes care of itself.
The same holds for how much of the app anyone has to take on. Nothing below the surface is required to use what is on it. What is there is offered, never owed.
How we are building it
The app is built in three depths.
The first depth is the tool. This is what opens when the app opens. Somebody who needs one particular thing, right now, should reach it and nothing else - no summary of how their week went, no suggestion of what they might enjoy next, no route that passes through anything on the way. They came for one thing, they get that thing, and they leave the moment they want to. Most people will never go past this, and that is a complete way to use Hollowine rather than a failure to engage with it.
The second depth is the bond. Underneath the tools there is somewhere that keeps living whether or not anyone is watching, and over time it comes to feel like a place instead of a product. It is an invitation and it behaves like one: it is there when it is looked for, it never calls, and nothing in it withers because somebody was away for a season. Attention that has to be maintained is not a bond, it is an obligation with better art.
The third depth is what the place has to say. There is a story underneath all of this, and it will never bring itself up. No badge, no unread mark, no gentle reminder that something is waiting. It is there for the evening when somebody wants to sit with it, and if that evening never comes, nothing has been missed - the two depths above it were never incomplete without it.
Each depth is optional to the one before it, and that is the whole design. The app is finished at every one of them. Going deeper is something a person may decide to do, not something the app talks them into.